Bring Clean Energy To The World With Pampero Board Game

October 24, 2022 by brennon

APE Games are on Kickstarter right now with their clean energy board game, Pampero! It looks stunning thanks to the artwork by Ian O'Toole and comes from board game designer Julián Pombo.

Pampero Kickstarter // APE Games

Pampero is a hand-management and card-driven action-selection game (good to get all of the mechanics out of the way first haha). You will start off with a set of eight cards that form a tableau at the beginning of the game. During a turn, you have the option to play a card into one of the empty spaces on a row or bring them back into your hand.

Pampero Components // APE Games

Once three actions have been done, you will go into a special consolidation phase. The rightmost card in a row generates batteries from stored energy, allows you to collect income and advances the game timer. Throughout the game, you're going to be trying to make as much money as you can from energy generation but through clean sources!

Pampero Components // APE Games

There are a lot more intricacies to the game than that of course but it seems like it's one of those daunting board games that at first just looks like a mess of symbols. As someone who has played plenty of symbology-heavy games (looking at your Terraforming Mars and Race For The Galaxy to name two), this is one of those games that is actually a lot easier than it looks!

Pampero Layout // APE Games

It has been described as a little bit like Brass but also Concordia (two board games I really like). More details on the rules can be found in the Rulebook (work in progress) and there are plenty of videos over on the Kickstarter page worth having a watch of.

I was certainly drawn in by the comparisons to games like Brass and the theme of clean/green energy is one that hopefully finds its way into more board/card games. It might be just to add a sense of theme but it starts to put the idea at the forefront of more people's minds.

Could you be tempted to give this a look?